While in the shower this morning I was trying to determine just what it is that makes me love Mass Effect just that little bit more than Dragon Age and decided that it probably comes down to my inherent (though admittedly slight) bias towards sci-fi over fantasy as a genre.
Don't get me wrong, of course, I love Dragon Age and I think it actually does a lot of things better than Mass Effect (integrating it's lore into its story, the races feel more fleshed out, etc), but Mass Effect is the one that makes me tear up a little bit when I fire it up for the first time in awhile and that menu music starts to play. You can hardly put it down to nostalgia, either, as I only played Mass Effect when LE released two years ago (jfc has it been two years already???) and followed up with Dragon Age late last year and into this one.
While fantasy is a fantastic medium for exploring the human condition and many other things─ I feel like science fiction is uniquely positioned to explore our hopes for the future of our species.
In times of turmoil a writer can look forward to the great blank canvas of the future and paint with words their most fervent wish for humanity going forward. We dream of a utopian future where no one wants for anything and we travel freely among the stars, learning from the people we find there, no longer alone in the wide and empty universe. We can also write our greatest fears, our downfall, our last gasping breath as a species that burned too hot too fast only to vanish─ unknown and unmourned in our brevity. All for the sake of warning our contemporaries in the one way we know how.
Something that's always really impacted me is that I will never leave this planet. The vast majority of us never will. Most of us, however, admire the people trying to make it happen─ NASA, rocket scientists, astronauts, and the many, many people that support them and make their work possible. Astronauts reach the moon and the stars beyond not just with rockets but by standing on the shoulders of humanity at large through our massed resources and collective knowledge painstakingly gathered over thousands of generations. Together, all of human history lifts them up and out of the fragile bubble that surrounds our planet and into the vast unknown with the hope that while you and I will never follow in their footsteps, they will carry our memory with them and leave signs of us in places we will never tread. Some small testament to our fragile existence in spite of all the odds conspiring against us having ever existed to begin with.
And I think that's beautiful.
Mass Effect and Dragon Age are both involve a hero uniting many disparate peoples against a larger foe, but Mass Effect is about humanity taking its place in the larger galactic community just a handful of years before insurmountable forces try to wipe out not just humanity, but all life. For all its flaws playing the ME trilogy has a catharsis for me that the DA trilogy doesn't. It scratches a very particular itch that feels like it needs scratching more than ever these days.
TLDR; I think I'm going to go play some Mass Effect today.
2087
stormborns
theartofmadeline
izzy806
jacobvanloon
dededos